“What were they speaking about?”

“I couldn’t hear. Their voices were muffled.”

“Did you hear the Tsar call him by name?”

Katamidze stared up at the lightbulb in the ceiling, teeth gritting with the exertion of remembering. “The Tsar called out a word when the man first entered the room. It could have been a name. I remembered it for a while, but then it went out of my head.”

“Try, Katamidze. Try to remember it now.”

The prisoner laughed. “After so long trying to forget…” He shook his head. “No. I don’t recall. The next thing I remember is that the Tsar and the guard began to argue. Then the guns went off. There was screaming. The room filled with smoke.”

“Why didn’t you run?” asked Pekkala.

“I was so petrified I couldn’t get my legs to take me up the stairs. I just stood there and watched. I couldn’t believe what was happening.”

“What did you do then?”

“The shooting stopped suddenly. The door was half open. I could see the guard reloading the guns. Bodies were writhing on the floor. I heard groaning. A woman’s arm reached out through the smoke. I could see Alexei. He was still sitting in his chair. He had his hands held up by his chest. He was just staring straight ahead. When the guns were loaded again, the guard moved from one person to the next.” He fell silent, his jaw locked open, unable to find the words.

“Did you see him shoot Alexei?”

“I saw him shoot the Tsarina,” whispered Katamidze.

Pekkala flinched, as if the sound of that blast had just ripped through the air. “But what about Alexei? What happened to him?”

“I don’t know. I don’t see how anyone could have survived. Finally, I came to my senses and ran. Up the stairs. Out the front door. As I left the house I nearly fell over the two guards who had let me in. They’d both been shot and were lying on the floor. There was a lot of blood. I assumed they were dead. I didn’t stop to check. I don’t understand it. If the Cheka were supposed to be guarding the Romanovs, why would one of them have murdered the Tsar and even some of his own people?”

“What happened next, Katamidze?”

“I ran out into the dark,” the man replied, “and I just kept running. First I went home, but then I realized it was only a matter of time before someone came looking for me, either the gunman or people who thought I’d committed the murders. So I left. I ran away. In the woods outside of town I have a little cabin, the kind they call a Zemlyanka.”

Pekkala thought of his own cabin, deep in the forest of Krasnagolyana, now only a silhouette of ash and rusted nails.

“I knew I’d be safe there,” continued Katamidze, “for a while at least. I had been on the move for about an hour when I passed by the old mine at the edge of town. It is a bad place. In the old language, it is called Tunug Koriak. It means ‘the place where the birds have stopped singing.’ The locals stay away from there. The people who worked in that mine had to be brought in from somewhere else. They all got sick. Most of them died.”

“What was mined there?”

“Radium. The stuff they use on watches and on compasses. It glows in the dark. The dust is poisonous.”

“What did you see at the mine?”

“One of the Cheka trucks. The same man who killed the Romanovs. He had unloaded the bodies next to the mine shaft. He was throwing them down one by one.”

“Are you sure it was him?”

Katamidze nodded. “The headlights of the truck were on. When he passed in front of the beam, I knew it was him.”

“But are you sure he threw in all of the bodies?”

“By the time I arrived, the truck was already there. I don’t know how many bodies he threw down.”

“Did he see you?”

“No. It was dark. I hid behind the old buildings where the mine workers lived. I waited until he climbed back in the truck and drove off. Then I started running. When I got to my cabin, I stayed there for a while. But I didn’t feel safe. I moved again. And again. Somewhere along the way, I read in the paper that the Romanovs had been executed on orders from Moscow. All nice and official. But that’s not what it looked like to me. After I read that, I realized I knew something I wasn’t supposed to know. Who can you trust after that? I kept moving, until I ended up in Vodovenko.”

“How did you end up here, Katamidze?”

“I was living on the streets in Moscow, in the sewers. Some tunnel workers found me. I don’t know how long I had been down there. It was the only place where I thought I might be safe. Do you know what that feels like, Inspector? Never feeling safe, no matter where you are?”

“Yes,” replied Pekkala. “I do.”

On the 2nd of March 1917, with riots in the streets of Petrograd and soldiers at the front in open mutiny against their officers, the Tsar gave up his power as absolute ruler of Russia.

One week later, with negotiations under way to have the Romanovs exiled to Britain, the Tsar and his family were placed under house arrest at the Tsarskoye Selo estate.

General Kornilov, the Revolutionary Commander of the Petrograd district, informed the staff at Tsarskoye Selo that they had twenty-four hours to leave. Any who chose to remain behind would be placed under the same conditions of arrest as the royal family.

Most of the staff departed immediately.

Pekkala chose to stay.

The Tsar had given him the use of a small cottage on the outskirts of the estate, not far from the horse enclosure known as the Pensioner’s Stables. It was here that Pekkala waited, with a growing sense of helplessness, for events to unfold. The confusion outside the palace gates was made worse by the fact that within the imperial household, no one seemed to have any sense of direction.

Pekkala’s only instructions, which he had received on the same day the Tsar had abdicated, had been to stand by for more orders. In this time of uncertainty, what Pekkala found most difficult was the ordinary, everyday tasks which he had once carried out so fluidly that he never gave them any thought. Things like boiling water for tea, or making his bed, or washing his clothes became suddenly monumental in their complexity. With nothing else to do, anticipation gnawed at him as he tried to imagine what events were taking place beyond the confines of his rapidly shrinking world.

Pekkala did not hear from the Tsar. Instead, he picked up fragments of gossip when he went each day to pick up rations from the kitchen.

He learned that negotiations had begun to move the Romanov family into exile in Britain. They were to sail, under armed Royal Navy escort, from the arctic port of Murmansk. At first, the Tsar had been reluctant to travel, since his children were recovering from measles. The Tsarina, fearing a long sea journey, had requested that they sail only as far as Denmark.

With crowds of armed factory workers arriving daily to jeer at the Romanovs through the gates of the Royal Estate, Pekkala knew that if the Romanovs were to escape, they would have to be smuggled out. Since no news of this plan had reached Pekkala, he came to the conclusion that he was being left behind to fend for himself.

Soon afterwards, however, he learned that the British had withdrawn their offer of asylum. From then on, until the Revolutionary Committee figured out what to do with them, the Romanovs were trapped inside their own estate.

For the sake of the children, the Tsar and Tsarina were trying to carry on as normal an existence as they could. Alexei’s tutor, Pierre Gilliard-known to the Romanovs as Zhilik-who had also chosen to remain behind, taught his daily classes in the study of French. The Tsar himself taught history and geography.

Pekkala always found the kitchen filled with off-duty guards warming up after their foot patrols around the estate. They knew who he was, and Pekkala could not help being surprised at their lack of hostility towards him. Unlike the teachers and personal servants who had stayed behind, they considered him separate from the Romanovs. His decision to remain at Tsarskoye Selo baffled them. Privately, they encouraged him to leave and even offered to help him slip out through the perimeter of guards.